ABSTRACT
This chapter explains why culture is necessary to hold society together and provides some important elements of culture. It summarizes briefly several popular theories of cultural change and explores the several factors that cause. The chapter discusses the cultural lag theory and its limitations and also explains the doctrine of cultural relativism. Cultural evolution is the name given to this gradual, accumulative process. Political debates about culture often focus on whether the government should support monoculturalism or multiculturalism. The advantage of monoculturalism is that shared culture tends to hold society together; the advantage of multiculturalism is that it incorporates diversity and lets subgroups revere their own history and view that history as a strong building block of the larger culture. Cultural assumptions and observations are locked into a society’s language. For instance, communication between multilingual people transmits cultural differences between societies. Cultures or societies contain certain aspects that are similar among all cultures.
